An educator shares her biggest challenges and how the right piece of technology can bring a school together

With the rapid rise of online technology resources, coupled with the ever-expanding list of the latest teaching strategies, an educator might feel like they are constantly walking through a thick, dark jungle to carve a clear path to harness the power of the hardware, software, and new theories to effectively improve teaching and learning.

But before we can optimize the student’s learning potential we have to face facts. There are a host (well, at least 12) challenges that I’ve identified that educators must first address before classroom models are flexible enough to expand both within and beyond classroom walls, and our solution for helping to solve them.

So my list looks like this:

1. The Incredible Shrinking Budget. Inadequate funding forces schools to increase class sizes, cut curriculum, eliminate teaching positions, and shift costs for paper, printing and other supplies to parents—leading to the unfortunate education mantra of ‘doing more with less.’
2. An F for Feedback. Letter grades do not provide students with enough feedback or motivation to improve, especially in the project-based learning world and other student-centered teaching technique. So the question is how do we make the paradigm shift to more meaningful ‘evaluations complete with dialogue’ to support standards-based learning?
3. Blurred Vision. Districts failing to make major infrastructure improvements in their schools often don’t’ have a clear, consistent visions for success nor the capacity that’s critical for the instructional implementation of technology.(Next page: teacher retention, parent-teacher communication and other top challenges)